Tuesday, 15 October 2019

"Osamu Tezuka - God of Manga" Exhibition


There's currently a Osamu Tezuka exhibition at the Tampere Art Museum. I went to see it with a friend of mine who's much more knowledgeable of Tezuka's work and more of a fan. I just recognized the name as the creator of Astro Boy but didn't really know more about it. I'm really glad I went, the exhibition was very interesting!

It turns out, Tezuka was a crazy prolific and accomplished creator, and his life's work is really humbling to think about and witness. Like he really got things done! At 18 he'd already published a comic that sold 400,000 copies, been through a war and a few years later finished his studies to become a doctor. All this time and through his life he continued to churn out comics and at the time of his death in 1989 at 60 years old his works comprised of over 700 titles and 170 000 pages. His last words were: "I'm begging you, let me work!", spoken to a nurse who had tried to take away his drawing equipment. (Wikipedia)

The exhibition has around 200 of those original comic pages drawn by him. I recommend this exhibition to everyone, but especially people who DRAW. It's so different to see the pages by yourself, seeing the lines and the strokes, the pale shadow of a sketch underneath, the correction fluid covering the mistakes. I've linked pictures underneath but of course it's just not the same.

The exhibition is open until 5.1.2020. The admission for students is 5 euros and there's information for everything in English, too.






There were also many pages from the comic Kimba the White Lion, which is widely known as "the work that Lion King ripped off". It's obvious though that the influences travelled both ways!





Oh yeah, there's also some Silver Fang originals downstairs!






Downstairs also has some more general manga stuff, which we didn't go through all that thoroughly. The best part was some crappy felt pens and a pre-printed outline for your own manga portrait. Here's my friend Esko displaying his amazing drawing skillz.


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